Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

It’s unfortunate that in many circles, the ethics of large scale civilian bombing in World War II is off limits. Sure, AC Grayling wrote a book about it, but for many, it’s just assumed that because we won the war and because the Nazis winning was an unthinkable prospect, everything we did was basically OK. But it clearly wasn’t. As Robert Pape argued in, strategic air bombing as a means of coercion, distinct from a means of destroying military equipment of capability, isn’t all that effective. The Nazis, after all, didn’t really care much about the lives of their people and the people actually being bombed, whether they’re German, Japanese or Vietnamese, rarely blame their home country’s government for the massive death tolls. They blame those actually killing them. So, in the most moral war ever, there were hundreds of thousands pointless civilian deaths.

But it’s hard to talk about such moral complexity, because no one wants to seem “objectively pro-fascist” or “soft on fascism” even 60 years later. So that’s why I applaud Nicholson Baker’s new work, Human Smoke, which makes the case that not only were the massive civilian bombings wrong, but the allied involvement in the War itself was immoral. He is making the pacifist case. I don’t agree with Baker’s conclusion, but his work should at least expand the playing field along which we think about the morality of civilian death in wartime. If we can talk about the needless loss of civilian life in World War II, then the needless loss of life in, say, Iraq becomes all the more pertinent.

But the title of this post isn’t “Why We Need to Listen to AC Grayling and Nicholson Baker more.” What’s so interesting about the case of civilian causalities in war is that the strongest argument against deliberate area bombing is utilitarian – classic, greatest good for the greatest number, aggregate preference utilitarian. Pure bean-counting would easily show that the Allied area bombing, or the bombing of North Vietnam, was pointless, immoral and stupid. “But greatest good for the greatest number means we kill more people to win the war” says the just war theorist or the squeamish. Well that’s true, but only if you don’t count everyone. The beautiful thing about utilitarianism, you see, is that you ought to count everyone’s interests equally. There’s no reason that we should be counting an Iraqi civilian more than an American one, so some utilitarians would say. So, with the case of area bombing in World War II, we killed all these German for no reason. It didn’t make the war end sooner, it didn’t break their morale, it didn’t ultimately save more lives.

But World War II is over, as is US military policy of bombing civilian areas with the intent purpose of killing civilians. So the question becomes, what ethical guidelines are best now? And to me, pure aggregate utilitarianism provides the best rough guide to our actions. Glenn Greenwald, looking back the Iraq war, thinks that this line of argument is insufficient, and that it will always justify more wars, because people can always exaggerate the possible risks of not intervening while understating the costs of war itself:

But virtually every line of rationale is purely utilitarian in its reasoning. The most unadorned admissions of error amount to little more than a concession that they simply assessed the costs and benefits inaccurately. And even with that extremely narrow concession, none of them — either in Slate or elsewhere — even reference in passing the fact that the war they cheered on ended the lives of hundreds of thousands (at least) of innocent Iraqi citizens and caused the internal and external displacement of millions more. That just doesn’t exist in the calculus.

More strikingly, not a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not — and has no right to — invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven’t attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: “Wars that aren’t directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn’t be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason.” Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.

Greenwald is making two arguments here: one which fully fits into a utilitarian framework and the other which rejects it. Those “hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens” could easily just be included into some sort of utilitarian calculus. If you approached war this way – where you roughly count innocent civilians lives equally, then surely we’d see much less war. But Greenwald goes further than just expanding the utilitarian calculus to including non-Americans, but to make a more deontological claim – that war that isn’t in response to the homeland being attacked or threatened is not just stupid and destructive, but wrong. Although Greenwald and I are probably similarly dovish, it’s hard to see how his admirable calculative generosity towards the lives and interests of Iraqis (and other Others) is consistent with this hard principle of limited/non-intervention. Greenwald’s main pragmatic point is that war is always awful, and that we systematically underrate the costs of war, so we should have very, very stringent requirements for engaging in it. And this point is fair, I really don’t trust the American public and the Republican party, especially after a terrorist attack, to show enough nuance when deciding whether or not the costs and benefits of military action work out.

But just because our politics are imperfect doesn’t make Greenwald’s Jeffersonian position the correct one. That’s because the reason he endorses it is that war leads to excess civilian death. And that’s it! So, can you imagine a situation where the US ought to engage in some sort of military conflict, despite not being “attacked or even threatened”? Sure, plenty of us can. Gulf War I, Bosnia, Kosovo, cases of genocide etc etc. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be prudent about intervention – in Darfur, for example, there are good reasons why a military intervention is a bad idea and we did kill an awful lot of Iraqis in Gulf War I, but to stipulate that we limit our military to this impossibly narrow criteria really ties our hands down unnecessarily.

The other, more speculative and nuanced reason why Greenwald’s criteria is bad is because, well, it would lead to the killing of more innocent civilians than my criteria of pure, body-count utilitarianism. Let’s say a country, or a country which harbors terrorists, does attack us. Is it always right to invade that country, kill civilians and endanger more American lives? Not necessarily. Just look at Israel. Surely they are justified in taking military action in the West Bank and Gaza strip, but it is in no way clear that any of these actions actually work at making Israel more secure. Or look at the war in Lebanon, both in the 1980s and the summer of 2006. These were surely “justified” interventions, in the case of Lebanon in 2006, there were forces within Lebanon lobbing rockets into Israeli civilian centers. And Israel intervened, killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians, littered cluster bombs across Southern Lebanon and then didn’t make their country much safer. It’s hard to say that from a third party, utilitarian, eye-of-god perspective, that the Summer War was a good one.

Greenwald can’t have it both ways. If he really wants every innocent civilian to count as “one” in his war-calculus, then adding on silly addenda about being “attacked” or “threatened to be attacked” is nonsensical. For it leaves some civilians, who by virtue of their birth are fated to be slaughtered by their own governments or neighboring nations, out to dry, while other civilians are perfectly justified in being killed because their governments or terrorists in their midst attacked some other country which lead to an overreaction. This principle is neither consistent nor prudent. All it has to recommend to itself is that it would have stipulated against the Iraq War. Beyond that, however, it’s not much.